kxiong5 's review for:

Illuminations: Essays and Reflections by Walter Benjamin

4.75

challenging inspiring reflective slow-paced

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Walter Benjamin was such a romantic writer!!! This man’s words are so beautiful, even in translation??? You can read this like a novel or a series of essays that are intended to be connected (it even does the thing where the title drops in the essay “Images of Proust” and you’re like YEAAAA TITLE DROP) even though this was curated posthumously by Hannah Arendt, who clearly knew what she was doing (and also lowkey dragged Benjamin’s ass (lovingly) in her intro…) 

 

A lot of Benjamin’s work is ostensibly about art and forms but also makes a lot of points about the nature of experience in modern life and how / in what ways certain forms can enhance or reflect or make visible those conditions of modernity. Like memory and experience itself (the proximity and standardization of it!) These essays are variations on a theme** that should be read together and have a lot of common threads that still feel insightful when applied to different artistic modes and settings. 

 

One of those rare essay collections (posthumous too) that’s actually helpful to read in order to see the commonalities and shared terms on which Benjamin talks (memory-related foundation pieces are clustered together earlier on, the devaluation of experience carries through in every later discussion of “experience,” “shock” associated with urbanity links to “shock” of a motion picture from one essay to another, etc. >> and all of this leads so perfectly into the discussion of memory and Proust, historical memory, what happens to memory and experience within the proliferation of images through mechanical reproduction, the emphasis on speed + duplication, etc.) 

 

It’d be great to analyze them as branches of a tree/river that extend through this collection…alas I have read in fragments and fits and starts, so it’s hard to collect my thoughts in a braided river this way… :( But I should really go through each of these essays and write a handful of thoughts on each before I forget. 

4.75 for honest and moving writing that's theoretically rich even though Benjamin does pull things out of his ass (as all theorists of that time did, but him especially) and for Arendt's phenomenal intro, which gets about as honest as you can get re: contextualizing a person.